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Ten years of Sandinismo August 1989 | Page 7 AFTER 10 years of U.S.-backed counterrevolution, the Sandinistas remain in power--but they are compromised, and Nicaragua faces a crisis of major proportions. LANCE SELFA explains. TEN YEARS ago, when the Nicaraguan revolution toppled the Somoza dynasty, everything seemed possible. For the first time since the Cuban revolution 20 years earlier, a movement in the Americas triumphed against a Washington-backed dictatorship. It seemed the beginning of a chain which would see U.S. client states fall in Guatemala and El Salvador. For Nicaragua itself, the Sandinista triumph promised a better life for the mass of the population. Many on the left in the U.S. and Europe saw in Nicaragua a new model for revolutionary change. Today, however, these hopes seem wildly optimistic. The Nicaraguan economy is near collapse. Nicaragua's $550 per capita income ranks at the bottom of the Western Hemisphere, just above Haiti's. The 1987 Esquipulas peace process has forced Nicaragua to accept a number of humiliating concessions to the West and the domestic right-wing opposition. The ARENA government's triumph in El Salvador is testament to the failure of the Central American revolution to spread beyond Nicaragua's borders. What happened? Have the Sandinistas betrayed the hopes placed in them? What does the future hold for the Nicaraguan revolution? Above all else, blame for the sorry state of the Nicaraguan economy must be placed where it belongs: at Washington's doorstep. The U.S.-funded contra guerrilla war has killed more than 58,000 Nicaraguans since 1981. Washington's trade embargo, imposed in 1985, and its pressure on international lending agencies have choked off desperately needed sources of credit and currency. As a result, the economy grew at only about one-fourth the rate that the World Bank predicted it would in the 1980s. The costs of defending Nicragua's independence have been immense. Until recently, the war forced Nicaragua to spend about one-half of its small budget on the military rather than on needed social services. Contra attacks have destroyed crops, hospitals and schools. Earlier this year, inflation hit astronomical levels of 20,000 to 30,000 percent. Nicaraguans' ability to withstand these hardships is testament to their desire for self-determination. But since the Esquipulas Accords gave impetus to winding down the contra war, a weariness reflected in increasing popular estrangement from the government has set in. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TODAY'S NICARAGUA is not the joyous place of the revolution's first year. This is not to suggest that no significant reforms have been achieved in the last decade. The first year's literacy campaign decreased illiteracy from 50 percent to 12 percent. More than 80,000 landless families have received land under agrarian reform programs. Hospitals and schools have been built in rural areas. But the war was not the only factor which limited the extent of reforms. The Sandinistas' lasting commitment to a "mixed economy" contributed as well. Government reforms have always proceeded at a pace consistent with Sandinista attempts to maintain an alliance between workers, peasants and "patriotic" capitalists. For example, the government did not rely on massive expropriations of private landowners to distribute land, the vast bulk of which remains in private hands. Instead, it has distributed primarily state-owned and abandoned land. This has helped it to undercut contra sympathies among some landowners, but it has failed to satisfy adequately the land hunger. Workers' rights have also been limited by Sandinista attempts to mollify employers. For most of the 10 years since the triumph, the government has banned strikes. Moreover, the Sandinista-led trade unions, which organize about two-thirds of the working class, enforce "production unionism," emphasizing low wage increases and speed-up on the shop floor. "Pluralism," another Sandinista tenet, has found its expression in the range of political forces--both right and left--which function alongside Sandinista-led organizations. This means that a number of left-wing opposition parties have been able to run in elections, but there have been less beneficial effects as well. For example, the government's fears of antagonizing wide layers of the Catholic clergy and parishioners has meant that abortion remains illegal in Nicaragua. The new Nicaragua that remains today is the product of a series of plans, compromises and temporary measures which fit loosely within the Sandinista goal of developing an independent national capitalist economy. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - NICARAGUA IS neither the "Cuban-Soviet base" of right-wing fantasy, nor the socialist society of Third Worldists' dreams. Nevertheless, what happens in Nicaragua bears on prospects for change in the rest of the region. Revolutionaries in El Salvador and Guatemala took inspiration from the Nicaraguan revolution, seeing in it a guide to action in their countries. But the guide Sandinista politics provided reinforced a nationalist politics. It supported an all-class alliance--including sections of the capitalist class--against imperialism and its domestic agents. In El Salvador, this type of politics won the day in 1980, when FLMN guerrillas united in a "popular front" with conservative ex-Christian Democrats to form the FDR-FMLN. This transformed the Central American revolution into a series of wars within national frontiers. Revolutionizing society was off the agenda. Militarily defeating and/or coming to terms with a section of the U.S.-backed ruling class were the Sandinistas' main aims in 1979. They became the main aims of the FDR-FMLN and other opposition movements. The Central American peace plan recognized this. Drawn up in response to the Reagan administration's failure to defeat the Sandinistas, it sought ways to reconcile the forces of revolution and counterrevolution. In Nicaragua, this led to legitimizing the contras as a domestic political force. In El Salvador, it led the FDR-FMLN to offer a series of proposals in early 1989 to the death-squad government, pledging to call off the war if certain reforms in the electoral process and military were granted. Rather than providing the hoped-for breathing space, the implementation of the Esquipulas Accord has only helped to highlight the crisis in Nicaragua--and to shift it inside Nicaragua's borders. Early this year, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced massive cuts in the military and police departments. Other sections of the government felt austerity as well. In total, as many as 10,000 workers were laid off. Massive currency devaluations and the virtual elimination of all consumer subsidies have placed the Nicaraguan people's fate at the brutal hands of the international market. Already, signs of unrest are evident. Peasants have seized unused land against the wishes of the Nicaraguan Supreme Court. Strikes of teachers and tax drivers have brought confrontations with the government. An expert from the Instituto Historico Centroamericano explained: "[T]he government is walking a fine line between economic reforms so harsh they produce social unrest and recession, and loosening up so much that the reforms are not effective." The ex-contras who have returned to take part in the February 1990 elections hope to take advantage of this unrest to defeat the Sandinistas from the right. This appears doubtful. The opposition is divided into 21 different parties. Many of them want no part of an alliance with the contras. Moreover, most opinion polls show the Sandinistas are guaranteed a hard-core support of 30 percent of the electorate. But if the domestic right wing is successful in making gains for its U.S. backers, the survival of the Nicaraguan revolution could be jeopardized. Such an eventuality would be a tremendous blow to those fighting imperialism in the region and around the world. For whatever its limitations, the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution showed that it was possible to break the chain of U.S.-backed dictatorships in Central America.
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